http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Not since Helen of Troy has a beautiful woman caused so much political commotion.

I was one of a handful of journalists to recommend that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, select then Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. I thought her personal story was compelling. A housewife with no family money or connections takes on a corrupt Republican establishment in Alaska and beats it. As governor, she works with Democrats to enact a tough ethics law, and wins approval of a natural gas pipeline her predecessors had sought unsuccessfully for decades.

At the time she was nominated, Sarah Palin was the most popular governor in America, with the highest approval rating in the history of her state.

A small town girl who shops at Wal Mart, Sarah Palin is us. But better than us, a star athlete and a beauty queen happily married to her high school sweetheart, she's had a successful career while raising five children. As handy with a rifle as she is with a skillet, she can hunt, fish and dress game better than most men. A thousand feature stories could have been written about her. For that reason alone, I thought my colleagues would fall in love with her.

Boy was I wrong. Journalists and Democrats reacted to her the way vampires do to garlic. Instead of stories about how she'd toppled the Murkowski machine, we got speculation about whether she or daughter Bristol was the mother of her youngest son. No candidate for vice president has ever been subjected to such unfounded vituperation.

It's easy to understand why Democrats would be leery of Ms. Palin. Sen. McCain was lagging in the polls until he chose her as his running mate. He rocketed into a small lead until the subprime mortgage crisis and his chicken-with-its-head-cut off response to it torpedoed any hope of a Republican victory. Thousands turned out when the GOP candidates came to town. They weren't coming to see Sen. McCain.

But the vitriol is harder to understand. Sarah Palin's views are conventionally conservative. She's led a life free of scandal. She didn't leave a young woman to drown in her car, as one Democratic hero did. She didn't cheat on her spouse, as another Democratic hero did innumerable times. Nor did she pal around with domestic terrorists.

Her critics say Sarah Palin is stupid. Evidence for this is sparse. When two women of whom I think highly told me this, I asked them why they thought so. "Because she said she could see Alaska from her house," they replied. But it wasn't Ms. Palin who said this. It was a comedienne deliberately misquoting her.

If Ms. Palin were as stupid as her critics say, she wouldn't pose much of a political threat. So why all the fear and loathing?

That fear and loathing was evident in the efforts of many Democrats and journalists to blame Sarah Palin for the Tucson massacre. But as President Barack Obama said, nothing she (or anyone else) said motivated the madman Jared Loughner.

When Ms. Palin did not initially respond to the bogus charges she had incited murder, MSNBC talk show host Chris Matthews said she was "hiding." When she did respond, ABC News declared: "Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way to become part of the story."

CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder, not normally a fan, described Ms. Palin's statement as "almost presidential-esque." But her critics jumped on this sentence:

"But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn."

Blood libel, these critics said, refers to Medieval Christian charges that Jews murdered Christ, or, alternatively, used the blood of Christian children to make matzoh, and it is offensive to use the term in any other context.

Liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz noted the term "has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse...There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim."

There were no objections when liberal journalists Mike Barnicle, David Halberstam, Andrew Sullivan and Frank Rich used the term in its broader metaphorical meaning. Apparently, this is offensive only when Sarah Palin does it.

The double standard by which they judge Sarah Palin makes one thing clear: Liberals tell us who they fear.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.